In 1999 Gov. Jeb Bush scrapped Florida’s system of racial preferences and replaced it with a new policy, “One Florida,” that guaranteed admission to a Florida university to the top 20% of each high school’s graduating class.
Recently released figures show that black enrollment in Florida universities grew by “only” 1.6% last year, compared with an overall increase of 2.6%. That overall increase was fueled largely by a dramatic increase in Hispanic enrollment, which has grown 49% since 1999 and which “shot up by 7.3 percent” in the past year.
Democrats, predictably, claim that these figures mean that eliminating racial preferences “isn’t working.” Senate Democratic leader Les Miller of Tampa, for example, said “It is an I-told-you-so situation.”
Democrats such as Miller apparently believe in racial equality only to the extent that it produces racially proportionate results.
